


Incandescent

by whatimages (orphan_account)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Genderbending, Genderswap, Written pre-Series 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-11
Updated: 2012-01-28
Packaged: 2017-10-29 09:25:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/318365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/whatimages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Incandescent: adj. Characterized by ardent emotion or intensity or brilliance. "John suspects Sherlock Holmes might be the strangest woman he’s ever met in his life. "</p><p>Genderbend AU, written pre-Series 2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: This fic portrays a relationship that I would describe as "not exactly healthy," though it is a love story. Additionally: canon-typical violence, rough/possessive sex, and a moment of consensual asphyxiation.
> 
> Written pre-Series 2, as will become apparent.
> 
> Posted with all my love to Liz, who has been a peerless conductor of light throughout this whole process. This fic would not exist without her hand-holding, cheerleading, and editing, and I am greatly indebted to her.  
> -

John wakes from his nightmares of sand and blood to a quiet beige room in a temporary flat. His sweat is desert sweat and the sour tang in his mouth is blood. He gets up, tries to literally shake the dream off him, but it's there in his skin, indelible.

So he abandons sleep for the uncomfortable wakefulness of the dark and indecent hours of the morning: makes tea; stares at a book and pretends to read; stares at the computer screen and pretends to write. He insists he enjoys the silence and the solitude.

John Watson is an excellent surgeon and a good shot and he tries to be a decent human being. But he's a terrible liar.

*

Running into Mike Stamford had been uncomfortable accident, but nonetheless it ended up feeling like serendipity cloaked in small-talk and awkward pauses.

“Colleague of mine, looking for a flat-share.” Mike had said. “She’s a bit odd. Quite odd, actually. But you might get on all right.”

John shrugs and thinks there are few enough personality defects that a locked door won’t cure, so Mike drags him to Bart’s; it’s not changed enough to be rid of uncomfortable nostalgia and unwelcome reminders. He holds his hand steady mostly through strength of will.

Hunched over a microscope is a woman; she looks up from her work almost as if she’d been expecting them. Her face angular in a way that might be lovely but is mostly strange; the contrast of her dark hair and pale skin under the fluorescent lighting makes her look monochrome and severe. If she’s beautiful, it’s the way a scalpel is beautiful.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” she asks, like a scalpel. It nicks him in the lungs; his breath catches.

There’s a flurry of words, a brazen disregard for social niceties or getting to know you that puts John on his guard and at his ease at the same time. There’s a time, a place set for a real estate viewing that feels a bit like a tryst.

John suspects Sherlock Holmes might the strangest person he’s ever met in his life.

*

In the cab, Sherlock gathers up the little bits of him he wears so carelessly, assembles it into a Johnlike shape and hands it to him. It’s deeply unsettling, and he can’t decide what’s worse: the fact that she knows these things about him, or the fact that she doesn’t seem to care.

It’s appalling, invasive, and, he suspects, at least partially involuntary. He could choose to be annoyed, to cultivate a dislike for her and her strange, brash ways. Find a different flatmate or leave London. Instead, he tells the truth: “That was amazing.”

For a moment a strange emotion mars her unearthly features, and it takes John a second to realize it’s shock. But just as quickly it’s gone. “That’s not what people normally say.”

John takes the bait. “What do they normally say?”

“‘Piss off,’ if generous. ‘Bitch’ if not. ‘Cunt,’ if particularly irked. That’s the trend, anyway.”

John opens his mouth, shuts it again. “That seems a bit excessive,” he says finally.

Sherlock makes a vague noise of agreement, peers out the window at the passing streets.

He wants to press her further, to hold her quicksilver mind up to the light, but the cab pulls up to the crime scene. After that, everything gets extremely strange.

*

John has put bullets into people before, and has pulled them out again. Not the same bullet from the same person, but sometimes it feels like it could be; like there’s a kind of mysterious equivalence at work in who lives and who dies.

It’s simple enough: automatic correction for distance and wind and the resistance of glass, his hands steady as always. Reflex, kickback, and the faithful arc of the shot. There’s a startled whirl and a body crumpled suddenly to the ground, but John doesn’t stick around to see it.

He stands innocuously on the correct side of the caution tape, his face fixed into an expression of modulated concern and mild curiousity. Underneath it he feels his blood, thrumming.

Sherlock, cloaked in a comedically orange shock blanket, manages details with ruthless, whispered efficiency. John is mild and bland and unassuming, and Sherlock rolls her eyes through the whole performance. But as they leave she smiles at him, pleased and surprised; John has the distinct impression he just passed some sort of test. The standards are obscure and the results yet to be fully tabulated, but he falls easily into step with her, their stifled, giddy laughter lingering like trace evidence over the crime scene.

*

Halfway through unpacking his frankly meagre possessions, John looks up from squeezing his books into the overstuffed bookcase and asks an overdue question.

"Are you sure you won't mind?" John gestures vaguely between them with a copy of _Gray's_. She's supervising his contribution to the bookcase, making sure he doesn't upset her obscure filing system. It should bother him, the near-constant surveillance--not to mention her bizarre personal boundaries and lack of recognition for personal space--but it doesn't. Sherlock doesn’t pretend to be normal, so he doesn’t have to pretend either.

"Mind? Your books in my bookcase? You do pay half the rent, I suppose you're entitled to it. I'll eventually recover."

"I meant the whole, you know, living with a bloke thing."

Sherlock looks like the thought honestly never occurred to her. "You served in the army and are a doctor. I presume the female form has been sufficiently demystified. Moreover, if you found living in close quarters with a woman to be objectionable or uncomfortable, you would have come to this realization before misfiling your anatomy atlas."

He's beginning to catch on to the way Sherlock does things, which is a combination of cuttingly direct and unbearably circuitous. "You didn't answer my question though."

Sherlock purses her lips in distaste, as if John has accused her of something base. "I would find "living with a bloke" to be objectionable as a general principle, just as I find living with another woman objectionable. Living with _you_ particularly, in practice, I do not find objectionable at all."

John blinks, for a moment dumbfounded. He is pretty sure Sherlock just paid him a compliment.

"You shot a man for me within forty-eight hours of meeting me. I think that is an adequate test of the relationship."

John huffs out a laugh at that, and immediately feels a little chagrined because really, it's not at all humorous. But it doesn't quite feel grim either.

Sherlock smiles a little; she looks soft and pleased and a little fond; John thinks it's really not grim at all.

*

The limp, it seems, has left him permanently. The idea that he just needed to run it off is so gallingly offensive John prefers to think that the limp just packed its bags and left him one evening, leaving him to take care of the dog and the electric bill.

In the aftermath of the breakup, John has to take a good hard look at himself: he finds that he is the sort of person who sits up at night talking to his mad flatmate about the mysteries of people and science; the sort of person who tags along for some midday housebreaking to satisfy not criminal impulses but curious ones; the sort of person who eats meals at odd hours of the day or night and doesn’t mind moving the jar of eyeballs to use the microwave.

It’s an all right sort of person to be.

John nightmares still. It’s a verb, not a noun--not a thing that he _has_. If anything, they have him; those dusty, acrid dreams take him in their teeth and shake him until he wakes to quiet predawn light.

But when he goes downstairs, Sherlock is there, wearing yesterday’s clothes that are now today’s and disdaining sleep with practiced ease. She doesn’t look at him with pity, or with anything more than the usual amount of inquisitiveness. She doesn’t ask; instead, she demands that he make tea and picks up the conversation from wherever they left it five hours ago.

The day comes in over toast and marmalade and two mugs of tea. Sherlock steals the front section of the newspaper out of his hands and looks affronted when he tries to steal it back. They bicker aimlessly, and the minutes of the growing morning fit comfortably into the rhythm of their speech.

*

When they go to the bank, John insists on “colleague” because it’s a nice, structured word with neat containers built into its syllables and it fits in well with the slick and the shine. But Sebastian is slimy and has too many teeth, and the way he looks at Sherlock reads _ex-boyfriend_ with abrupt clarity; John wishes for the ambiguity of “friend” or the outright lie of “lover” as a screen between Sherlock and the shark-hungry leer.

He glances at her out of the corner of his eye; he has a brief impression of vulnerability, of a small person huddled in a big coat and a bigger intellect. But then it’s gone, replaced with a sharp mind and cutting remarks; whether it’s a transformation or a veneer is hard to say.

Their shoulders brush on the way out; John presses her on the matter of the lie about the secretary to avoid pressing her on the matter of the ex-boyfriend. She’s dismissive, assured, _the usual_.

The shiny steel doors of the elevator reflect their faces, dividing them with a thick line where the doors will part. Sherlock is just as polished and just as hard as the metal, refracting the world back on itself in magnified detail.

*

There is a case of mistaken identity, and as a consequence, a kidnapping.

It would be comical, except John’s too wild-eyed, tooth-and-nail adrenaline surge for humour. The ropes rasp at his wrists, every sensation enlarged and screaming along nerve endings that shout _get out_. It makes his voice steady and his mind open to the press of every detail of the world upon him

Which is why he notices a moving shadow when no one else does. It coalesces into a coat, an imperious voice, a swift and ruthless retribution.

Sherlock unties him: she fumbles with the knots, curses, mutters under her breath about the gall of John to be kidnapped and the mystifying sexism of idiots who make her life inconvenient.

“Thanks,” John says: it’s a strange sound--flat and inadequate, and Sherlock barely stops her tirade to acknowledge it.

The ropes come free, and Sherlock offers John a hand up. Their skin doesn’t touch, not through his coat and her gloves, but the pressure counterpoints his chafed wrists in an odd kind of singing.

John busies himself checking the vitals of his kidnappers even though he knows they’re dead. He says, “Jesus, Sherlock. That was a bit excessive.” It’s not, entirely, true--he would do (has done) the very same; but he feels the need to say it, to make at least a token gesture in the direction of conventional morality, as if this was an abstract matter and not his own life still clinging stubbornly to his bones, and all thanks to Sherlock’s disproportionate violence.

She waves him off, annoyed. “Would you prefer I invited them for tea and crumpets to talk about our differences?”

John laughs at that, a little too much, a little punch-drunk. Sherlock smiles, though it seems like the rest of her face hasn’t caught up because it wars briefly with her scowl.

“Besides, we’re even now,” she says, a pleased note lingering at the back of her voice.

John blinks. “I suppose we are,” he says, and chooses not to question the Holmesian equation in which rescues and incidental murders are symbols with weight and meaning and not the unfortunate product of necessity.

“Let’s go home, I’m famished,” he says, over a heart that beats thunderously loud.

There is a moment where they look at each other and John notices that Sherlock has grime on her face and her hair is in disarray. It’s the space between one breath and the next, a fleeting moment of pause before reflex takes over.

“Yes,” she says, and turns out back into the night. But she waits for him at the entrance to the tunnel, at that, at least, is something.

*

It’s when he notices the shy plane of her nape as she sweeps her hair up that John realizes he’s in trouble.

*

For all of her tendencies to forget things like food and sleep, Sherlock is a committed hedonist. When John cooks, she takes small bites and chews very carefully and after she swallows she sits for a moment, considering. Mushroom risotto is probably her favourite because she always fishes another mouthful out of the pan no matter how large a plate he gives her.

Half the time when she plays the violin, she's not touching the instrument for the sound it makes but for the way it feels. It's why she plucks at the strings with her fingertips, absorbing the sound waves through her skin.

John never asked Sherlock any of this; she never told him. He learned these things by watching her, through what Sherlock calls deduction but really is just the coupling of observation and obsession.

It must be awful, he thinks, to always see the world like this. To have the whole mess of London pressing in on you with all of their quirks and foibles would be unbearable. Even with one person, for him, it’s uncomfortable. Observations about Sherlock collect relentlessly in his mind: they lodge themselves in his head whether he wants them there or not.

But increasingly, he finds that he does.

*

Sherlock comes back from Belarus in a right snit: not even risotto and a round of shouting at crap telly does anything for her mood.

Her head lolls on the back of the sofa, apparently oppressed by the crushing weight of ennui. Her hair spills over the cushion near to where his hand sits on the back of the sofa, and the angle of her head exposes a vulnerable swath of her neck. John averts his gaze, but leaves his hand where it is.

“Belarus was that bad, hm?” he says, lunging for the distraction.

Sherlock sighs a world-weary, put-upon sigh. “It was a tedious little domestic murder. I went all the way to bloody Minsk for a spat that _Anderson_ could have figured out blinded and deafened.”

“I am deeply sorry that the Eastern European criminal class has failed to live up to your considerable expectations. Maybe try the Russian mob next time, yeah?”

She frowns at him with silent eloquence. “My _point_ is that I completely fail to comprehend our cultural fixation with romances. Half of them end in divorce and the other half end in the most pedestrian, uncreative murders I have ever laid eyes on. Crimes of passion are bloody _boring_.”

For a moment, John very carefully does not say anything. “Well, I promise to only ever commit murder with the utmost creativity.”

Sherlock smiles eerily at that. “Now that might be interesting. Still within the realm of the usual, of course, but interesting nonetheless.”

“I think that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. “

By Sherlock’s standards, it most definitely is.

*

Sherlock bored is a terror; Sherlock entertained is _horrifying_.

She’s so fucking alive it hurts to look at, her cheeks flushed and lips parted; it makes him think of that flush creeping over her neck and her lips wet and bitten and he cannot, _cannot_ allow himself to think like that because he will lose his mind.

The worst part of it all is that he keeps pace with her unerringly, that her triumphant smile mirrors his own. He catches himself thinking of Connie Price as a puzzle and not a human--and then a block of flats explode like a rebuke from the universe.

Sherlock sulks in her chair, seemingly more frustrated that the terms of the game have been violated than the fact of the terms themselves. She glowers and her damnable shirt is done up to just one button below what is strictly proprietary. Despite her irritation she admires this mad degenerate of a criminal for being _interesting._

John wants to slap her. He digs his fingernail into the base of his thumb and picks a fight instead.

“You’ll be very happy together,” he bites out. It’s all so stupidly obvious but it’s equally out of his control: just the sort of convulsive emotional display Sherlock has no time or patience for.

“Do you care about them at all?”

Sherlock, as per usual, misses the point completely.

*

John never expected to be the fifth pip, never suspected that this was the shape of the game. It puts certain things in perspective.

John’s a solider: he always thought he would die by bullet or explosion. That his death should be accompanied by a devastated look from a beautiful woman was not something he’d accounted for.

The utter desolation in Sherlock’s face in that first instant he steps out makes his heart leap into his mouth; when he bites down around the words in his ear he tastes blood.

Jim Moriarty is an odious little man in a nice suit and bad intentions. His odd voices echoes threateningly around the pool, the stilted syllables bouncing off one another.

“I have loved this,” he says, voice a caress. John remembers Sherlock’s bright-eyed flush, but there’s no trace of it now: there’s only a blank and bitter hardness pulled taut over her cheekbones.

“Oh don’t be this way Sherlock, I know you enjoyed it.” Moriarty pauses, as if waiting to reveal a secret. “I was watching you,” he says conspiratorially. “You’re my favourite show.”

Moriarty presses a little closer to Sherlock, as if drawn. John lunges more out of instinct than tactics: _Run, Sherlock_ , and if it’s the last thing he does at least he has the satisfaction of crushing Moriarty’s windpipe.

That Sherlock is too stubborn and Moriarty is too clever for John’s heroic self-sacrifice to work is not altogether surprising. The flickering red light on Sherlock’s forehead stops his blood cold in his veins: some things are not to be borne; some things are beyond his endurance. John backs away, heart hammering in panic and defeat.

And when it looks, for a searing miracle moment, that they’re going to walk out of here alive, John’s legs give out and he can’t even properly register or enjoy that Sherlock is tearing his clothes off. Every unfettered breath is heavy with feeling.

But of course, it doesn’t last.

John bows his head in assent to Sherlock’s silent question. _Yours, always,_ he says without saying, and the quiet look she gives him in return makes him think there are worse deaths.

*

There are worse deaths, but this one is not to be theirs. A gun fires and he only realizes he’s not the victim of an explosion when there are more gunshots and MI6 agents. It’s a war zone packed into a single building,and John’s body slips easily into action, obeying the single imperative hammering in his skull: _Protect Sherlock_.

Outside, the clear, cold air hits him like a blow. His hand hurts; he looks down to see his fingers twined white-knuckled with Sherlock’s, and realizes that she’d been thinking the same thing.

Another MI6 agent bundles them into a car: it’s awkward with their hands still clasped, but it never once occurs to John to let go.

*

When it's all said and done and the madman has disappeared and the lackeys have been shot and statements have been taken and Mycroft has lectured--well, John thinks his legs might work again one day. And Sherlock-- Sherlock is _livid_.

"Mycroft," she all but spits into the deep grey hours of the London night.

John, who thinks his hearing might be compromised--perhaps as a bizarre symptom of shock--says "What?"

"Bloody meddling Mycroft. I'll start with him."

There's a huge terrible glint in her grey eyes. She looks mad, electric. Not glowing with the triumph of her intellect, but scattershot, worn down and dangerous. The veneer of sociability she manages to veil herself with is wearing a little thin and her intent is shining through.

"You're angry at your brother," John says slowly, like he can't quite believe the words coming out of his mouth. "For saving us."

Sherlock glares at him. "Don't be stupid. I am angry at him for removing from me the incredibly delightful and just opportunity to destroy Moriarty."

There's not a lot John can say to that, because the other way that sentence can reasonably be construed is _I'm angry that I didn't get to blow us all up._

He settles for, "Ah." And then, because that's inadequate, he adds, "Forgive me for not being angry that we didn't all go up together."

Sherlock lunges abruptly at him, fists her hands in his shirt and all but drags him towards her. "He hurt you, John," she says flatly, like it explains everything.

In a way, it does.

John doesn't quite know what to say to that. There's something aching and bitter and sweet in his chest. "So you'd have hurt me too, to kill him."

She just looks at him for a long, long moment, her fingers still curled into his clothes. The bitter wind shifts her dark curls across her face. She's close enough to breathe in, all of her. "Oh John. Can you say you would do differently?"

For the second time that night, John has the wind completely and totally knocked out of him. His lungs constrict; he can't breathe anything that isn't her, isn't laced with those words and the big terrible truth of them. Because she is, of course, right. His nodded assent had been as much perversity as nobility, and she had seen through the adrenaline and the semtex vest and the sniper sights. Of course she had.

The night tilts crazily, and the sense that something is going to happen is so thick John could choke on it. He wants to kiss her, to lean in and crush her to him and bruise her lips and grip her shoulders hard to keep her here, all in one piece, with him--

Sherlock steps away and hails a passing cab; the tender chain of possibility is broken and John is left just reeling. But he has no choice but to get into the cab after Sherlock, has no choice at all but to follow her.

*

The ride back to the flat is excruciating. His nerves are frayed to shit; every bump in the road or flickering streetlight reads to his overtaxed sympathetic nervous system like danger. Sherlock's knee brushes against his occasionally when she shifts restlessly in her seat; it's like a burning brand gone right through him.

Baker Street is silent and deserted; the blown out facade across the road gapes like a bruised mouth. John shudders and hurries up the stairs after Sherlock. Sherlock, who is clearly feeling a bit off because she's holding the door open for him.

There's an awkward moment in the hallway where they're shedding coats and things and it's far, far too close; Sherlock's shoulder presses against his and a wave of want slams into him hard enough to knock him momentarily breathless. He tamps down on it fiercely, labels it as adrenaline comedown and tries to breathe normally.

The flat feels too small for them; they're still expansive and strung out and there aren't even any words to shovel into the wide open spaces. Home isn’t so much safety as a tone shift: the danger now lurks in speech and silences.

"So. Um. Tea, then?" he offers, rather lamely, in an effort to fill up all that space with ordinariness, to shrink the night back down to manageable proportions.

Sherlock, who still has not said a word, nods. This signifier, at least, he can understand.

He puts the kettle on as if it's a perfectly normal thing to do, as if it's not almost four in the morning on a night where they almost got blown up and as if John doesn't want to cross the stupid space keeping him from Sherlock and fuck her senseless, to get inside of her to where she can't be away from him, not now, not ever--

"Fuck," he says quietly. "You know, I think I might just turn in," he says, turning to direct this at her. She's leaning against the wall of their little kitchen, the line of her elegant and taut as always. It's then that he realizes she's hovering, as scraped raw as he is without the vocabulary to describe it.

She doesn't say anything, so he goes to leave for his room and his bed and a very necessary wank, but he has to pass her to do it and when he does she says, "John."

It arrests him immediately. His brain, his moral sense and his crippling exhaustion demand that he get the hell out of there, but of course he doesn't.

Sherlock pushes herself off the wall, and the trajectory is inevitable, as inevitable as it's always been. She comes to rest against him, her hand sliding into the fine hair at the nape of his neck. She looks at him curiously.

"You really should stop trying so hard," she says. And then she kisses him.

It shocks him so badly he can't respond at first, but her mouth is warm and soft and full and he is _kissing Sherlock_ , opening his mouth to her, pulling her close to him, his fingers scrabbling under her blouse to rest against the warm skin of her waist.

Just as his fingers start to drift a little higher, Sherlock pulls back, and John wonders if he's miscalculated terribly.

She frowns, and says, "Really John, I didn't expect you to be so polite." Except she says polite like it's a synonym for _boring_.

John exhales, and the breath ruffles her hair just a little. He looks at her, her mouth wet, waiting for him to do something. So he does. John picks up all his manners and his goodness and his self restraint and decides in earnest that it can all burn.

He shoves Sherlock back into the wall without gentleness or finesse and she has no time to grin before he's kissing her, hard and crushing. It's nothing at all like the first kiss--it's all tongues and teeth and messy insistence. Sherlock's fingers twist hard into his hair and John grips her hips and hauls her against him, pressing his growing arousal against her. She hums in approval against his mouth, reaching down to squeeze him through his trousers.

He could fuck her right here against the wall, is seriously considering it in fact, when Sherlock bites down on his lower lip and pushes him back. She doesn't so much push him away as push against him, pressing her hip deliberately against his erection. He manages to stifle a little moan, but she grins all the same. She's flushed and mussed and sharp enough to cut.

"I want to fuck you properly," she breathes, her eyes moving over his face, taking everything in, memorizing it and cataloguing it. John shivers, because _properly_ out of Sherlock's mouth could mean any number of things, but what it means most of all is the unwavering observation of those grey eyes.

She tugs him towards his bedroom insistently, and he only stops once to push her against the wall and kiss her. There's an awkward fumble with shoes and socks and sweaters, made more difficult by the fact that now that he's touching her, John refuses to stop.

She rakes her fingernails along his back as soon as his shirt is off, and he shudders a little, pulls her closer, gripping her arse tight. Between them, they manage to divest her of her shirt, bra and trousers; John decides it's good enough for now, and tumbles her onto the bed. He pushes her down on the mattress and she struggles against the weight of him pinning her there. It thrills him somewhere deep and hidden , and he's horrified--but before the horror can rise up in him, Sherlock sinks her teeth into his neck, hard. He cries out in shock and pain and god, _need_ , grinding helplessly against her through the stupid layers of cotton between them. She doesn't let up, mercilessly biting into the place where his neck and shoulder meet. The pain radiates through him, thorough and deep, meeting with the insistent ache in his cock.

When she releases him, he pants helplessly into her shoulder for a moment, his senses briefly overwhelmed by the reality of her skin and her teeth. But it's not enough, even that isn't enough. He needs to be flooded with her, to be overcome and overcoming. Sherlock dispenses with his boxers, her fingers playing delicately over his arousal. He resists the urge to buck into her hand, but only barely.

"Sherlock," he murmurs, and the sound is coarse with need. He jerks her knickers off with graceless urgency, finds her already so wet for him. When he sinks two fingers into her, her moan is raw and wild and loud.

She begins stroking his cock in earnest and he can't help the little sounds that escape him, any more than she can stop her hips from canting into his hand. Their obscene noises are muffled by fevered kisses, his body anchored by her touch. Somewhere far off, John thinks he could happily die like this.

Her long, clever fingers are too insistent and his nerves too raw; the heat and pressure building at the base of his spine is too much, too soon. He stills Shelock's hand with his, twining their fingers together and pressing her hand back into the mattress.

"John," she murmurs--and he thinks he will never, ever tire of hearing her say his name like that--"I need you." It's an artless statement, but all the more true for it--it's expansively true, and it makes John's breath catch and his heart stutter.

Sherlock pushes him over, straddling his narrow hips, trapping his hands with hers. John leans against the headboard, just looking at her for a long moment. The distant subterranean movements of her emotions are bared to him now, visible in the flutter of her pulse and the expansion of her ribs. She braces herself against him, touching him only where the inside of her thighs presses against his hips and her hand grips his shoulder. Their breath mingles in the infinitesimal space between their bodies. He can feel the heat of her, almost but not quite touching him; he holds himself utterly still, letting the moment unspool.

When she finally, finally sinks down onto him, everything contracts, the whole of the world compressed to the slick wet heat of her, her sweat on his skin and the insistent press of her fingers into the bruise she left on him. He grips her hips with one hand and her hair with the other, licking the moans out of her mouth.

He’s murmuring nonsense now, _oh god Sherlock you’re so fucking good please don’t stop fuck yes_ and it’s not quite begging but feels like it could be. His hand falls out of her hair and rests loosely against her neck, the heel of his hand against her throat.

She stills abruptly, her pupils wide and dark, lips parted; the sudden stop is torturous, pressure and heat without friction. “Yes, John,” she whispers, glancing down at his hand. She presses her neck into his palm.

Almost involuntarily, his fingers tighten and his thumb shifts, pressing the heel of his hand into her throat, and a savage little thrill runs through him. Sherlock lets out a stuttered moan, her hips moving feverishly, grinding against him. When he thrusts up into her his hand clenches reflexively, cutting off her air supply just a little. The breath she sucks in is his; she is full of him entirely and he is nowhere that is not her.

She draws him on inexorably; he’s starting to splinter, his words reduced to shards and syllables, _oh god Sherlock yes fuck please_. She’s so close, he can feel it in the tight coils of her muscles, the desperate sounds that escape from the cage of his fingers. He presses one more time into the vulnerability of her throat and there she is, coming desperately apart over him. She sinks her teeth into his neck once more and he’s done; he’s helpless as his orgasm rips through him, an orange-yellow explosion behind his eyelids, her name tumbling carelessly from his lips.

In the aftermath, she presses her face into his neck, just breathing him in. He strokes the fragile line of her spine and wonders distantly about what will happen when the world coheres around them once more.

“He won’t stop, you know,” says Sherlock sometime later, when their breathing has slowed and the sweat has dried. It hits him in the chest, in the place that opened up when he nodded his assent in the pool under the watery, flickering light. He tightens his arms around her involuntarily.

He looks at her sprawled comfortably on his chest, the streetlight outside casting high shadows on her face. “Would you?” he asks softly.

She looks at him as if it’s a stupid question; it is. “Of course not.”

There are any number of things John could do. He could get up, leave, find some degree of normalcy living somewhere else doing a real job. At the very least he could call Lestrade, or Mycroft and warn them. But he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls Sherlock closer and kisses her, pressing a promise into her mouth.

*

John wakes to pain. This is not, in itself unusual; his body’s been angry at him for a long time now, and most of the time they sit in an uneasy truce of minor aches and pains. But this particular morning his shoulder’s aching like a thunderstorm’s coming down; his entire body is coated in a thin sheen of hurt.

Beside him, Sherlock still sleeps, her frenetic energy dissipated, body slack. One hand curls against his shoulder. It’s the only place their bodies touch, despite the narrow bed; it becomes imbued with significance. John brushes his fingers over her wrist, returning her unconscious gesture of possessiveness with his waking one.

The day holds them gently; the calm feels strange and hollow, like the light itself is fragile. John gets up gingerly, mindful of his body’s protestations. The creak of the floorboards under him is almost unbearably loud. He turns to glance back at Sherlock and his neck twinges insistently; he presses a hand to it and it aches more sharply.

In the bathroom mirror, John examines himself. There’s the usual scar, still dark and puckered and angry looking. Moriarty’s violence left no trace on him, despite the kidnapping. The only marks are from Sherlock--scratches down his back and a deep purple bruise on his throat. John presses a finger to the bruise and smiles.

When he returns to his room, having showered and shaved and generally put his human skin back on, she is awake but still in bed, staring absently at the wall.

“Good morning,” he says, for something to say. Wonders if he should feel awkward, and at the fact that he doesn’t.

She turns to look at him, expression oddly blank. “Yes. I think it is.”

So much contained in the obviousness of the sentence. He wonders about her sometimes. Most of the time.

There are things he wants to shovel into this gap, this silent room--- _are you all right? how did you sleep? do you hurt?_ But he doesn’t; manages to resist the urge to cover up all their strangeness with tea and breakfast and some sort of mad persistent belief that everything is all right, because it isn’t.

Sherlock sits up carefully and winces in pain. John is at her side immediately, all concerned doctor.

“Sherlock, are you all right?” He hadn’t noticed any injuries last night, but anything number of unpleasant possibilities present themselves to him anyway. “Did Moriarty hurt you?” He sits down beside her on the bed reflexively, the need to be near her asserting itself once again.

She looks at him perplexedly. “I’m fine. It wasn’t him.”

 _Oh_. John flushes furiously, guilt and shame heating his skin. “Sherlock, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have--I’m sorry.”

There’s the _you’re an idiot_ look again, and John thinks he is losing his mind because it actually warms him for a moment. “For what? Given that it’s been a number of years since I’ve engaged in intercourse, a little discomfort is hardly surprising.” She couldn’t sound more clinical if she read from a textbook, and all the warmth drains out of him.

John flicks back the coverlet; on her hips spanning the exact distance of his fingers are faint bruises, just as he suspected there might be. He frowns, tamps down on the swell of possessive wanting at the sight of her skin and the evidence that he touched it.

“Really John, your concern for my wellbeing is entirely overwrought. Neither you nor Jim Moriarty have inflicted any lasting damage, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to get up and have a shower.” She’s flippant, irritated, but she doesn’t move.

John remembers the play of emotion across her face like cold light, and the desperate glorious way she’d pulled him to her. Now the sheets are tangled carelessly in her legs and she doesn’t appear to notice her nakedness, but it’s all John can see.

“I don’t think it’s overwrought, Sherlock.”

She opens her mouth to protest; ever so gently John presses his fingers to her throat over the memory of last night. Her irritation crumples like so much wet tissue and a shaken, breathy sound slips out of her.

John Watson is a courageous man. It’s not a boast, it’s an empirical fact. He thinks about the possibility of distance and awkwardness and the marks she left on him fading away to nothing, and it is intolerable. So he does what he’s always done, which is to be brave and a little stupid: he cups Sherlock’s face tenderly, smooths the sharp jut of her cheekbones with his thumbs; he moves slowly, gives her plenty of time to move away, but when she doesn’t, he leans down and kisses her.

It’s nothing like the hard, insistent kisses of the previous night. He kisses her deep and soft, his lips tracing out _I love you, I love you_ on hers. He kisses her with his heart in his mouth. Words are inexcusably vague, but this, this she will understand. He hopes.

Sherlock trembles underneath him and he goes to pull back, when her arms come up around him, pulling him awkwardly closer to her. She breaks away from his mouth to press her face into his neck.

“John,” she says into his pulse. She presses a soft kiss to the mark she made on him and he trembles a little (how could he not?)

For a long while he simply kisses her, absorbed in the texture of her skin and the play of lips and tongue and teeth. He sheds yesterday’s clothes again to feel her skin against him instead.

He shifts her properly under him and her hands play across his back, retracing with her fingertips the marks her nails had made on him before. John presses a kiss to her throat where it’s surely tender and her breath catches.

John kisses every one of the marks he left on her, his mouth trailing over her hips, drawing out her pleased hums and soft sighs. He kisses lower, rubbing his cheek on her inner thigh. When he bites down delicately, she moans, and the sound goes right through him; he worries her skin with his teeth until it’s dark red and the rest of her is flushed with want and anticipation. He kisses higher until he finds where she’s still tender and aching anew. The first flood of her on his tongue makes him moan; the sound mingles with her ragged gasp somewhere over his head.

John takes her apart ever so gently with his mouth until she’s trembling, every flicker of his tongue over her clit making her writhe and cry out.

It’s not until she grinds out a desperate, whispered, “Please,” that he presses his tongue against her _just so_ and she comes, her fingers twisting in his hair, his name in her voice.

She’s flushed, hair wild and he has to just look at her for a second, at the lazy unguardedness he has wrung from her. She pulls him to her, kisses him wet and messily. His cock drags against her hip and he gasps a little into her mouth.

Sherlock twines herself around him, one hand coming to rest on his erection. She kisses him, stroking him gently. It’s soothing and arousing all at once, and John surrenders himself to her touch, to her mouth on his. She presses him onwards with her clever fingers, and soon, almost by surprise, John is stuttering out a warning to her. She murmurs her encouragement against his mouth and that’s all he needs to tumble over the razor edge of his orgasm, coming hot and hard over them both.

When he opens his eyes, Sherlock is looking at him with undisguised wonderment. Very carefully, she touches her tongue to the sticky tip of one finger. It’s not calculated for show; she’s just honestly curious. That, of all things, is what makes something in his chest clench, what makes him draw her down to him and whisper fiercely in her hair, _I fucking love you_.

She digs her sharp little fingernails into his shoulder, exhales his name into his skin.

***


	2. Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: This chapter contains canon-typical violence and mentions of stalking

They settle into a routine easily enough. John works Mondays and Wednesdays at the surgery, keeps the flat tidy, does the shopping. Sherlock harasses Lestrade, works on her experiments and spends a great deal of time staring at the wall, her fingertips steepled, thinking. 

Except this time there’s no comedown. Usually there’s a grace period between cases, where Sherlock is elated, high on her own brilliance; then she quickly spirals into restless, destructive boredom. But this time, Sherlock remains tightly wound and precise, her intellect absorbed and bent toward some unspoken end. For the first three days, he’s grateful for the quiet; after that, the ambient calm makes the back of his neck itch.

This time, Sherlock will disturb their still evenings by sliding into his lap, by pricking the itch sharply with her fingernails, by kissing him until he is breathless and hard; he learns the contours of her body as if he has always known them.

It takes him until the middle of the second week to realize that she’s planning something in earnest. He knows better than to ask too many questions. The uneasy tingling in his skin recedes, to be replaced by the taste of electricity, the expectation of lightning.

*

A friend from med school is in town, and suggests a pint. It’s perfectly normal and ordinary, and it makes John perfectly uneasy at first. Alys chatters on about her work with Medecins Sans Frontieres; while it is all objectively quite fascinating, John is distracted, trying to formulate sensible, comprehensible answers to the inevitable questions about what the hell he’s doing these days.

“So how’ve you been?” asks Alys. “It’s a shame about your injury,” she adds gently. 

To buy time, and because he likes Alys but he doesn’t tell-her-about-his-nightmares like her, he shrugs and makes light of it. “It’s not all bad. Nice to be back to hot showers and regular working hours. “ He hasn’t quite given up the getting shot at bit, though. 

Alys shoots him a puzzled look. “John Watson, gone domestic? I hardly believe my ears.”

She’s quite pretty, he realizes, and no longer wearing her wedding ring. Alys is a genuinely kind person: she cares about people and takes an interest in them and is one of those tortured souls who got into medicine to heal people. If he wanted, he could lean in closer and let his hand casually brush hers, ask her to meet him for dinner tomorrow; visit her on weekends and move out to be with her within the socially sanctioned timeframe of six to eight months. If he wanted.

John shakes his head. “You shouldn’t.” And because he’s had a couple of pints and feels, inexplicably, the need to account for himself, he adds. “I’ve taken up freelance detective work. Of a sort.” And then somehow he’s sketching the outline of the bizarre story of him and Sherlock, condensed, edited and editorialized to seem humorous and not at all terrifying. 

By the time he’s done, Alys is gaping at him. “So, not at all domestic then.” she says.

“Well.” It depends on one’s definition of domestic. 

Another half pint into the evening, and Alys leans in conspiratorially and asks the question he’s been dreading. “So, any women vying for your affections? I bet with the wounded hero bit the girls come flocking.” 

John blinks, momentarily caught off guard. “Ah. Well.” This part is the impossible-to-explain-part, the strange part, the unwise and ill-advised part. Unconsciously, he presses a hand to the fresh bruise under his collar. 

Then Alys reminds him why she was ahead of him in med school, and it is because she is much smarter than him: “It’s Sherlock, isn’t it?”

John nods, doesn’t bother trying to explain himself. There’s not much of it that fits into words anyway.

“You always did have a strange sense of adventure.”

Later, when they part, Alys gives him a hug and tells him to be careful; he lies through his teeth and promises he will. 

The walk back home isn’t far enough to justify the tube; John lets the walk and the cold night air slough the ordinariness off him. The strike of his feet on the pavement reverberates into his bones, shaking the core of him, concealed under the woolly jumpers and politeness. 

He’s three blocks from home and lost in thought; and despite the near-constant tension running through him these days, it’s still closer to calm than blood in the desert. With Sherlock he might see the battlefield, but it’s not a war. Despite the snipers and the semtex and the corpses, his soldier’s instincts have relaxed.

This is what he tells himself when he’s taken by surprise.

It’s a rough grab out of an alleyway, accompanied by a glancing blow that clips John’s good shoulder instead of knocking him unconscious. His adrenaline is instantly up, the world becoming crystalline around him, body humming along to the tune he remembers so well. His assailant lunges for him again, gets a punch to John’s jaw that splits his lip and another to his gut that near winds him. 

The other man is bigger than him, but John’s done hand-to-hand and has had more than enough of this; he hooks a leg behind his attacker’s and pulls until the other man’s head connects solidly with the brick wall. There’s a noise, the tender protestation of bone, but John doesn’t check, doesn’t even look back.

He hurries the last few blocks home, his senses scraped raw with awareness, anxiety a messy knot in his chest. 

When he finally bursts into the flat, Sherlock looks up from the violin in her hands, changeable eyes wide. To anyone else she’d seem distant and preoccupied, but to John she looks the very picture of an anxious lover, worrying the instrument in her hands. 

“Oh thank god,” he says, sagging against the door. The lines around her eyes relax a little at the sight of him, but she all but leaps to her feet and crowds him against the door.

“John,” she says. “John, John, John.” She runs her fingers lightly over him, checking for injuries. There’s no question in her face, none at all. Late, didn’t text, superficial injuries, madman hunting them. Even John can figure it out. 

“I’m fine,” he says. Her mouth tightens and he wonders why he even bothers trying to lie to her. “Bit of a scuffle in a back alley. It could have been much worse. I fought him off without too much trouble.” He pauses, still trying to wrap his head around the evening, trying to think past the blood still thundering distantly in his ears. “I think he was trying to kidnap me.” The way he says it, as if it’s an ordinary feature of his existence, makes him shudder. 

“No. If he wanted you, he would have taken you. He’s toying with me.” Sherlock almost spits it, and he honest to god cannot tell if she’s angry about his injuries, or about the fact that they are apparently an affront to her person.

John lets out an irritated huff despite himself. “Glad to know that my randomly being accosted by hired thugs isn’t personal. It’s delightful being a pawn in this little game between the two of you, you have no idea.”

“It wasn’t random, and what did you expect?” She’s got the high-handed tone on again, the _really John, just think_ one. “Moriarty has no interest in _you_. If you were just going about London living a boring little life working at the surgery and watching telly, he might accidentally blow you up, but even that’s statistically unlikely. He wants me. You’re just a way to get to me.”

There is a long, long moment where he is just completely at a loss as to what to say next. “Right, then. As it appears not to have worked, I think I’ll go up to bed.”

Which is exactly what he does, using his irritation and fading adrenaline to fuel his retreat to the bedroom that is nominally his--and he resolutely does not turn back to look at her.

He doesn’t sleep here much anymore. Usually only when Sherlock’s being an insomniac violinist (rare, these days) and each time he’s woken to her pressed against his back. The sheets are dirty (well-used), and a few of her distinctive curls linger on his pillow. He shucks his clothes and lies down in the casual dirtiness of their intimacy. Tries to calm his breathing and his mind and his galloping ill-temper.

Some time later John starts out of his doze at the creak of the bed springs as Sherlock sits down beside him. He reaches out to touch her without thinking.

When she speaks, her voice is small and quiet and even. “If he touches you again, John, I’m going to cut his heart out. I’m going to cut it out myself and feed it to him.” From anyone else, John would dismiss such a threat as violent braggodoccio; in Sherlock’s earnestness, it sounds closer to a promise. 

She plants her hands on his shoulders and leans over him. “I will end him, John. Whatever it takes, I will,” she whispers. His mind stutters for a moment, caught somewhere between _shouldn’t_ and _will_.

He pulls her down on top of him, holding her against his chest. “Not alone,” he murmurs.

She nods, begins to speak; her words wash over him, pooling in the hollow of his throat. This is how it begins in earnest: his palms against her back, feeling the blood and breath in her moving.

*

Dinner at Angelo’s one rainy evening is more a concession to necessity than a proper date--John’s too tired to cook and Sherlock is incapable--but it feels good to sit close to her in public and let their knees brush under the table. She spends as much time looking at him as she does compulsively watching the street outside, and as far as these things go it’s positively intimate.

When her plate is cleared, there’s a little folded square of paper left under it. Sherlock frowns. She unfolds it carefully (cream stationary, a thick, fine weight that John mistrusts on instinct). The lines around her mouth and eyes tighten as she reads. John braces himself.

Sherlock starts up, swings on her coat and John scrambles after her. She’s silent on the walk back, brisker than usual. Their hands touch and she presses the paper into his palm.

_Do hope you enjoyed the linguine. Did you have the chianti or the pinot? I would have loved to watch your mouth as you drank it. Red becomes you, darling.  
\- JM_

John goes cold. He’s aware, distantly of something in him howling in rage. But what settles in him is a hard certainty, as ordinary and incontrovertible as the steel and cement of London. 

When they arrive home, he finally turns to Sherlock--who is _smiling_.

“Care to let me in on the joke?” he says tightly. 

“They all do it, even the brilliant ones, and he has,” she mutters.

John waits.

“A mistake! He’s shown his hand, his weakness. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. It’s a love note, John. ‘Red becomes you’--it’s intimate, sensual. He’s not just intellectually obsessed, he’s in love.”

“With you.” And it’s weird, because John has taken this for a given, that Moriarty wants Sherlock the way John does, with his blood and bones But to Sherlock it’s revelatory; it rearranges the three of them into a constellation with story and shape.

“Yes. Has been for years probably. I imagine it must have been you moving in here that set him off.”

“Ah.”

In a low, earnest voice she sketches out the outline of a plan, her words coming fast as she rearranges her thoughts around this new information. John stands in the middle of their living room, letting this take form around them: Seven riddles for seven days and three nights for three buttons add up to one chance for two people. John interjects with questions like “What the hell do you mean?”, and-- 

“How can you be sure it’ll work?” he says when she’s finished. 

“It will.” He’d accuse her of not looking at the details, but Sherlock is all details. They’ll never be caught, if they manage to make it out alive.

“Sherlock. Moriarty isn’t an idiot, and he’s not going to agree to meet you alone somewhere.”

Sherlock sighs in exasperation. “Yes, he will.”

“How can you be so sure?” He has no doubt she’d been just as sure the last time. Sherlock being free with her life is something he’s come to accept as part of being around her; her being idiotic about it is not. 

“You, John.” Her eyes soften and she brushes her fingertips across his jaw. “If it was you, I’d do the same.” She says it like it’s the most obvious, ordinary thing in the world, and maybe it is. 

He presses his forehead to hers, seeking from contact what she can’t give him with words. She kisses him, gently at first; as soon as he opens to her, she bites down on his healing lip until it splits again and licks the coppery, startled gasp out of his mouth. Delicately, she touches her tongue to his bleeding lip; it’s swollen and irritated again, but John holds himself perfectly still under her curiosity.

When Sherlock pulls back, her urgency has dissipated; she has the quiet look of someone standing in a church. 

_All you had to do was ask,_ he thinks. _All you ever had to do was ask._

*

After that, the sense that they’re hurtling towards something inevitable accelerates. Sherlock hangs a red scarf in the window and spends a great deal of time on the phone with Mycroft; She’s never restless or bored, even in the everyday clatter of the flat on a weeknight; when she moves she’s animated by thought. John is expansively, forcefully calm; he buttresses the ebb and flow of her mind with his two hands pressed against her back.

She only ever touches him in the dark these days, with the blinds down and the lights out. John presses a kiss to her neck and she sighs appreciatively--but when he goes to nip at the lovely jut of her collarbone, she pushes him away abruptly. 

“Don’t be foolish, John” she says. She’s right, of course. So much hinges on the pale and easily-bruised expanse of her neck. 

“Do it for me, then,” he whispers. He presses his fingertips to her collarbone, the top of her breast, the curve of her hip. She leaves a mirror of his touch on him with her teeth: she is the territory and he the map. 

The next day, Sherlock posts the first riddle.

***


End file.
